Monday, July 4, 2011

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Difficulties in using and accessing new services have been the most frequently mentioned reasons for slow service acceptance in the past. For future mobile services to succeed, it is therefore critical that users are able to get intuitive and convenient access to the services they personally need in a given situation or context. The idea of Mobile Personality is to allow the mobile user to develop her own online personality in terms of personal preference, usage and service profiles over time, as well as the offered services, to acquire a unique proactive behavior. This vision of adaptive personalized services is essentially based on advanced profiling and personalization concepts and context-aware computing, as well as flexible and evolvable service-support middleware.

It is assumed that systems beyond 3G (B3G) encompass heterogeneous access networks in order to provide the best available mobile connectivity to customers.

These systems are not only considered to integrate several network platforms, but they also strongly encourage the vision of a substantial richness of services and applications. On the other hand – with the complexity of services constantly increasing – we can only grasp a vague impression of how most end-users will soon be confronted with a broad variety of services and multiple ways to combine them. Problems in accessing and using newly deployed services have already been the most frequently mentioned reasons for slow service adoption in the past. This may be even more the case for novel multimedia-type services and context-aware applications in the future. As a consequence, user- and context-sensitive provisioning of new services will be crucial.

The effective use of future services can only be achieved through adequate personalization concepts and proactive service advertisement and adaptation. It will essentially be new concepts for service provisioning and deployment, together with new service paradigms, that attract customers and bring mobile communication beyond voice applications to the mass market.

The illustration below shows the concept of an evolving virtual personality, which is not limited to users, but can also be applied to other entities of a mobile system in order to implement adaptive personal services that develop their own initiative and spawn a Personality Space.

As service deployment and usage develop over time, such a ‘Mobile Personality’ will allow different users to develop their personal preference profiles and typical service usage patterns according to their personal requirements, as well as allowing the services offered to acquire unique proactive behavior.

The ‘personality’ of a user is reflected in the set of personal profiles associated with him and it is passed to other users, network nodes and service providers. User modeling and profiling beyond device independence – covering user preferences and wishes – are essential for supporting such a virtual mobile personality.

Context awareness is key enabling the creation of this personality space. Context awareness is an attribute of a service that is capable of accessing, interpreting and manipulating knowledge of its environment and adapting the service behavior accordingly.9 To facilitate intelligent context-aware services that can develop their own personalities, a context management framework that allows the acquisition, management and processing of context information based on a flexible Web-Service-based framework is needed.

Adaptation and programmability of services should not be limited to content adaptation as it is in most of today’s systems. Instead, it will involve modifications to behavior (service logic) and to service interaction and signaling as well.